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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22702420">all the uncomfortable silences</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotBettaRed/pseuds/NotBettaRed'>NotBettaRed</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>All the fanon, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Angst without plot, Background Reed900 - Freeform, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Suicide Attempt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 03:22:17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,568</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22702420</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotBettaRed/pseuds/NotBettaRed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Too many things had happened in the past month. Just one after another, piling up and pushing each other along, gathering speed until it felt like an avalanche was bearing down on him, ready to sweep him away.</p>
<p>Gavin tries to take the easy way out, but it isn't that easy.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Upgraded Connor | RK900/Gavin Reed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>113</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>all the uncomfortable silences</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Gavin woke up. That was the first disappointment of the day. He had really thought that the pills and the alcohol would have been enough. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Everything he touched lately turned to crap so of course he couldn’t even kill himself properly. He should have used the gun. He had tried. He had pressed the muzzle to the side of his head, put his finger on the trigger, tried to convince himself to just squeeze. Coward. He had passed out with the gun still in his hand.</p>
<p>Somewhere in the distance he could hear a noise. Music playing. Eventually it stopped, silence dragged on for several long moments, then the music started again. His phone. The world swam around him as he tried to sit up and he had to cling to the arm of the couch to keep his balance. The music stopped and the silence was briefly deafening but by the time he had found his phone it was ringing again.</p>
<p>“What do you want?” His voice sounded slurred even to his own ears but he couldn’t make himself care.</p>
<p>“Your shift began two hours ago,” RK900 said, and he sounded annoyed. “You’re late.”</p>
<p>“I’m not coming in,” Gavin said. Failed suicide attempts should be an automatic get out of work free card. Not that he could actually use that excuse.</p>
<p>“You’re drunk.” RK900 managed to pack an impressive amount of disdain and disapproval into those two words.</p>
<p>Gavin wasn’t going to deny it, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. He squeezed his eyes shut, tried to keep a grip on the phone, and hoped that the android would decide a drunken human was more trouble than he felt like dealing with.</p>
<p>“We have been assigned a new case and your presence is required. Get up and get dressed. I am already en route to your apartment.”</p>
<p>“Fuck off and solve it yourself,” Gavin said. “I just slow you down.”</p>
<p>Silence dragged on for so long that he thought the android had hung up on him, then, “I apologise for my comments yesterday,” RK900 said stiffly. “If you are still angry, we can discuss it when I arrive. I will be at your location in approximately fifteen minutes.”</p>
<p>The line went dead and Gavin forced himself to stand up. He staggered into the bathroom, shed his clothes, and climbed into the shower. The first blast of water was icy but he turned the water up as hot as it would go and soon steam was billowing around him. His skin turned bright red but he couldn’t feel the heat. Everything felt numb and tingling and his bones seemed to be filled with ice.</p>
<p>He stayed in the shower until he became aware of a distant pounding. RK900 knocking on the door. Gavin had not bothered with soap or shampoo, he had just stood under the cascading water, leaning against the cool tiles, mind blank and silent. If he didn’t get out and answer the door, the android would probably just break it down. Again. He turned off the water, wrapped himself in towels, and headed for the door, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him.</p>
<p>RK900 looked the same as always. The same neatly pressed clothes. The same carefully combed hair. The same vaguely pissed off expression on his face. His LED was circling a fast yellow but flashed briefly red when he looked at Gavin, and that was not the same as always.</p>
<p>Gavin left him standing in the open doorway and went to his room, shutting the door and dressing on autopilot. His fingers felt slow and uncoordinated, making the simple act of dressing himself into an exhausting process. Distantly he could hear RK900 speaking but the words faded in and out and he did not even try to follow them.</p>
<p>Time skipped and he was walking down the narrow stairwell of his apartment building, following the android. His legs felt loose and disconnected, the nebulous connection between his feet and the floor seeming to fade in and out. He missed the next step entirely and was tilting forward into space and would have hurtled down the stairs if an iron grip had not caught his arm. </p>
<p>A brief flash of disappointment surged through him. If RK900 hadn’t been there he might have fallen and broken his neck. That wasn’t how he had intended to die, but it would have worked. The feeling faded away just as fast as it had arrived.</p>
<p>Time skipped and he was sitting in the passenger seat of his car, RK900 behind the wheel. He couldn’t remember walking to the parking deck or handing over his keys or getting in the car. It didn’t matter. He leaned against the cold glass of the window and closed his eyes.</p>
<p>A hand was shaking his shoulder and he tried to push it away. He could smell coffee. The cup was pressed into his hands and somehow he held on to it. It was from his favorite coffee shop. He recognized the color of the cup, the smell of the coffee. The smell was overpowering and when he took a sip he winced at the bitterness which seemed to be magnified a thousand times.</p>
<p>Holding the cup gave him something to focus on and the heat was welcome but he couldn’t drink it. RK900 was speaking. He could hear the words but they didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Soon enough the car was moving again, and that didn’t matter either.</p>
<p>Time skipped and Gavin leaned forward in his seat, gasping for air. This was wrong. He couldn’t breathe, and that should have been good, that was what he had wanted. Except it felt wrong and a surge of panic passed through him. He slammed the palm of his hand against the window.</p>
<p>“Stop.”</p>
<p>That was his voice, and it was a bit surprising. He had forgotten that he could speak. “Stop the car.”</p>
<p>Tires squealed and the car pulled off the road too abruptly. Everything shifted too fast, disorienting, and he was going to be sick. He fumbled with the door handle and then he was falling out into the cold air. Coffee splashed on the ground, spreading out, one stream of it flowing into the cracks in the pavement like a branching brown river. He was sick, and that splashed on the ground too, mixing with the liquid already there.</p>
<p>Hands lifted him up, pressing him into the side of the car. RK900 swiped his fingers across Gavin’s lips and then those same fingers moved to the android’s mouth. That was disgusting. Gavin should tell him how disgusting that was, but the words just weren’t coming.</p>
<p>“--how many? Gavin!” RK900 had never sounded like that. Frightened? Angry, bored, annoyed, those were all common but the stupid android didn’t know how to sound scared. “How many did you take?”</p>
<p>What? Oh. The pills. “All of them.”</p>
<p>Everything faded to black.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>Consciousness returned abruptly, accompanied by an annoyingly regular beeping sound. The lights were too bright and Gavin squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block them out. His head was pounding and his stomach felt like it was trying to claw its way out of him and everything <i>hurt</i>. He couldn’t hold back the groan that escaped.</p>
<p>“You’re awake.”</p>
<p>Turning his head was one of the hardest things he had ever done. Focusing was even harder. The flash of an LED, yellow then blue, familiar features swimming in front of his eyes before he had to squeeze them shut again. “Nines?”</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>He looked again. Brown eyes, ugly shirt, a pinched look on the android’s face. “Connor. The fuck are you doing here?”</p>
<p>“You’re in the hospital,” Connor said, ignoring his question. “Do you remember what happened?”</p>
<p>Gavin remembered. He really wished he didn’t. “Fuck you,” he muttered. He closed his eyes again and waited until the world went away.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>The nurse was annoyingly cheerful. Big wide smile with too many teeth. Eyes that sparkled. Upbeat voice as she prodded him to at least try to eat some of the crappy hospital food. Gavin didn’t throw his jello at her face.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>They wanted him to talk about it. He didn’t have anything he wanted to say. They were persistent, and talking meant the difference between going home after his 72 hour hold, and getting sent somewhere else with more locks and softer walls. So he talked.</p>
<p>He’d had a bad day. Gotten a bad case. Made a bad decision. No, it wasn’t going to happen again. He didn’t think anyone believed him, but they were the right words, so he kept on saying them.</p>
<p>Connor just kept showing back up and Gavin just kept right on ignoring him. Tina came by twice, and her eyes were red, and Gavin couldn’t look at her because that was enough to actually make him feel guilty. He didn’t want to feel. Anderson even showed up at one point, telling Gavin that he <i>understood</i>, and that was such bullshit that Gavin just stared at the ceiling until he went away again. Nines never showed.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>His apartment looked strange. It smelled wrong. Everything put neatly away, the smell of cleanser still lingering in the air from the hours he had spent scrubbing it before he sat down on the couch with a bottle of vodka, a bottle of pills, and his service weapon. He wanted a drink, just to make things feel less strange, but the bottles were gone. His gun was gone too. Things stayed strange.</p>
<p>Tina refused to leave and Gavin wasn’t sure if he wanted her to or not. She somehow managed to get his cat back from the neighbor that Gavin had given him to. The old bitch who lived next door hated Gavin, but she loved cats, so she probably had not returned him willingly. Gavin buried his face in the cat’s soft fur, listened to the loud rumbling purr, and felt another stab of guilt. His cat was an asshole. He didn’t like anyone but Gavin and sometimes Tina. It wasn’t fair to just dump him off on a stranger and walk away. Gavin was not a good person. The cat deserved better.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>His neighbor brought over a plate of cookies and a toy she said his cat had liked. Maybe she wasn’t such a bitch after all.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>His first day back at work was weird. He felt like people were staring. They probably were. Gossiping about how a coworker had tried to off themselves was a pretty shit thing to do but he knew that it had happened anyway. There were no secrets in the precinct. A bunch of gossipy assholes. But Gavin would have done the same thing, so whatever. </p>
<p>No one would meet his eyes, and that was just fine with him.</p>
<p>Fowler didn’t even yell at him, and that was weird enough to catapult him straight into the Twilight Zone. Gavin was going to be riding a desk until he got cleared by the department shrink. That was no surprise, but usually he would have tried to argue the point. Except something about the way Fowler was speaking to him and the look in his eyes was freaking Gavin out, so he just nodded and headed to his desk.</p>
<p>Paperwork was <i>terrible</i> and Gavin hated it--he had always hated it--but it was predictable and it meant that he didn’t have to speak to anyone so he turned on his terminal and turned off his brain and focused on someone else’s expense reports. </p>
<p>Hours passed and then a shadow fell across his desk. Gavin frowned and looked up from his keyboard. RK900 was standing beside his desk, looking awkward. More awkward than usual even. “Hey,” Gavin said, just as awkwardly.</p>
<p>“You’re back.” RK900 never pointed out the obvious. That was something he mocked others for doing. Usually Gavin would agree with that, but he couldn’t think of anything better to say, so obvious was all that was left.</p>
<p>“Just paperwork. Stuck on desk duty,” Gavin said. “Guess no one trusts me with a gun yet.” It was supposed to be a joke but even he could tell that it fell flat. </p>
<p>RK900 looked away, but not fast enough for Gavin to miss the way his LED flashed red. “I’m sorry.”</p>
<p>“Sorry?” Gavin asked blankly. RK900 had nothing to be sorry about. Except then he remembered the argument. That was the last time they had really spoken before everything went to shit. “No. Look, it wasn’t about you, it was…” Gavin glared down at his desk. “It was a lot of things, but it wasn’t you.”</p>
<p>Silence dragged on long past the point of being uncomfortable. Then, “I’m glad you’re not dead.”</p>
<p>Gavin wanted to say, yeah, me too, but he wasn’t quite there yet. So, “Thanks.”</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>Fifteen minutes before his shift was over, his phone rang. His screen lit up with “Asshat -- Ignore” but instead of hitting the fuck you button he picked it up and swiped answer. “Hey.”</p>
<p>“You actually answered,” his brother’s voice rang out. He sounded surprised.</p>
<p>“Yeah, well,” Gavin sighed. “What do you want, Elijah?”</p>
<p>Uncomfortable small talk was uncomfortable but somehow Gavin agreed to meet his brother for dinner in an hour. He hung up his phone, set it down on the desk, and glared at it. Too late to back out now.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>The restaurant was one that Gavin would never have picked himself. The atmosphere was pretentious, the menu was overpriced, and even the waitstaff were wearing nicer shoes than he was. He hated it, but at least he wasn’t picking up the bill.</p>
<p>If nothing else, the food was good. They had more than one option on the menu that was vegetarian without being a salad, so that put it miles above most of the crap restaurants in Detroit. Gavin stabbed his fork into his eggplant parmesan, pretended that he was actually eating it, and scowled at the plate.</p>
<p>“Not to your liking?”</p>
<p>“Fuck the food,” Gavin said. “What do you <i>want</i>, Eli?”</p>
<p>Elijah sighed and let his silverware drop to the plate. “I’m just worried about my little brother,” he said. “Do I not have that right, considering?”</p>
<p>“No. You really don’t,” Gavin said flatly. “How did you even find out? Hack my medical records?”</p>
<p>“Your partner called me. He thought I should know.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, well, he was wrong about that,” Gavin said. He tried to summon up some energy to be annoyed at RK900, but he couldn’t find it. “Stupid ‘bot doesn’t really understand how humans work. Maybe you should release an update.”</p>
<p>“Perhaps he understands more than you realise.”</p>
<p>Gavin shoved some food in his mouth just so he could focus on angry chewing, instead of actually having to respond to that. The food wasn’t terrible.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” Elijah said eventually.</p>
<p>Gavin almost choked. “Sorry for <i>what</i>?” he spat out. Sorry could cover a great many things. “Sorry for showing back up, trying to force your way back into my life? Or sorry for--” Sorry for everything that had come before.</p>
<p><i>”I’m sorry,”</i> Elijah repeated. It wasn’t good enough. Sorry was <i>nothing</i>.</p>
<p>They both glared at the table until a waitress appeared. She seemed to sense the tension in the air, but it didn’t stop her from suggesting dessert. They both ended up with pie.</p>
<p>“The funeral was a circus,” Elijah said eventually. “You’re lucky you missed it.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, well, I was busy.” Busy getting his stomach pumped, getting stuck with needles, having nurses and coworkers and shrinks crowding around wanting to hear about his <i>feelings<i>. That was just asking for another uncomfortable silence, so he said, “I guess Auntie Katherine was drunk.”</i></i></p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Extremely drunk,” Elijah confirmed, “and she made a speech.”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>Gavin huffed out a laugh, actually feeling the amusement for a moment. “Glad I missed it.” He stabbed at his pie with the fork. Their father had <i>hated</i> pie. He almost wanted to eat it, just to spite the old man. “Let me guess. A speech about what a wonderful man her brother was. A fucking <i>saint.</i>”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Something like that. A bit less coherent, and with a lot more slurring.”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Dad was an asshole.” Gavin dropped his fork. Shoved the plate away.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“He was.”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Dad was an <i>asshole</i>,” Gavin repeated, “and you just left me with him.”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“I was thirteen,” Elijah protested. “I was just a child!”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“So was I!” Gavin shouted, and people at the nearby tables turned to look. “I was just a kid, and mom was dead, and you just fucking left. Mister child prodigy, man of the year, off to change the world--” He snapped his jaw shut, turned away, considered just getting up and leaving.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“I’m sorry,” Elijah said again, and this time it felt real.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Fuck you.” </i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Is that why you…?” Elijah trailed off, looked away. “Because of Dad?”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“I didn’t try to off myself because of Dad,” Gavin said. “Or because of you. It was...it was a lot of things.”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Okay,” Elijah said. He stared down at the table as the silence lingered. “But...is that why you hate me?” he asked.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“That, and the fucking robots,” Gavin said half heartedly. He didn’t hate androids as much as he used to. “I mean, what the fuck, Eli? We watched the same movies as kids. AIs, rising up to take over the world. Kill all humans. I had fucking nightmares, but you, you looked at it and said, yeah! Let’s do that! What the fuck?”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“I think it turned out okay.”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“There was a revolution,” Gavin said slowly, like he was speaking to a particularly dumb child. “Fighting in the streets. People <i>died</i>.”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>Elijah shrugged, a smile twitched at the corner of his lips. “They’re not all bad.”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Nines is okay, I guess,” Gavin admitted.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“So. Nines? He’s your...partner?”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Fuck off, Eli.”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>---</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>The department shrink had cleared him. It was all bullshit. Even Gavin couldn’t say for certain that anything had changed. He was here, he was breathing, he wasn’t currently pressing a gun to his forehead. Maybe that did mean that things were better. </i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>He stared down at his phone. There was one thing that he knew was still broken. He scrolled through his contacts and his thumb hovered over RK900’s name. Briefly he considered just sending a message, but this wasn’t something that he could fix with a text. He pressed the button to make the call before he could change his mind. The call connected almost immediately, but silence lingered.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Hey,” Gavin said, the word feeling choked.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“Is something wrong?” RK900 asked.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“No, I just--” Gavin squeezed his eyes shut. Took a deep breath. “I think we should talk. Can you come over?”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>When the call ended he dropped the phone onto the table and his head into his hands. Too many things had happened in the past month. Just one after another, piling up and pushing each other along, gathering speed until it felt like an avalanche was bearing down on him, ready to sweep him away.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>Captain Fowler, refusing to recommend him for the sergeant’s exam. Because Gavin is an asshole, because he can’t get along with his fellow officers, because he is too reckless, and because all those things together made him a terrible candidate for a leadership position. Tina telling him that Fowler had a point, that those things were true, and that maybe Gavin needed to make some changes if he actually wanted that promotion. The explosive fight they had had afterwards.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>That last case. The one with the kid. Dead kids always sucked--he always hated those cases--but somehow it was even worse when it turned out not to be murder after all. When they just had to close the case, knowing that there was no bad guy to put away. No one to bring to justice. It wasn’t fair.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>Eli showing back up, seeing him in person for the first time in years. Finding out that their father was dying. Then finding out that he was actually dead, too fast, before Gavin could decide if he wanted to go and forgive him for everything, or if he just wanted to go and tell him what an asshole he was, right there on his deathbed.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>Sleeping with Nines. Pushing him away afterwards, telling him it would never happen again. He still wasn’t sure which half of that had been the mistake. Probably both. It shouldn’t have happened like that, just because Gavin was upset and needed a distraction. It shouldn’t have ended like that, with Gavin just spreading the pain around because he was too weak to carry it himself.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>He wasn’t sure if this was even something that he could fix. But he had to try. Over the past few weeks, everything else had slowly gotten better, but the Nines shaped hole in his life had just felt worse and worse. He hadn’t even realised how much time they had been spending together until suddenly they weren’t. He hadn’t realised how much he enjoyed their conversations, until those conversations had been replaced by tense words and uncomfortable silences every time they ran into each other at work. He hoped that it wasn’t too late to fix it.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>The knock sounded at the door. Gavin took a deep breath, stood up, and went to answer it. He was going to try.</i>
  </i>
</p>
  </div></div>
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